Metrication

[BobC]

My vote is and will remain for Metric.

 

[bob308]

metric for those that have to count on their fingers.

 

[boslab]

does that include steel erectors [ironworkers] most seem to be <=9

 

[Newman109]

I think if we expell the right number of lawyers from the planet at just the right trajectory, we could modify our orbit to exactly 100 days.

Good idea! And send some of their crooked, fraudulent, cheating clients with them. That would take care of a goodly amount of the population. Less traffic, too.

 

[-TJ]

Metrication. Great, what am I going to do with my 1/4", 3/8", & 1/2" drive tools!?

And, BTW, I understand that the 1/2" drive etc, also exists with metric sets in metric countries.

Your point was exactly WHAT?

It was just a little dry humor, relax.

My point is as long as I can remember, the metric system has been coming, yet across the globe the inch is still the standard with some things like those hand tools.

I don't favor either system in general. Learn both.

 

[Joe Henderson]

All I know is I often cannot get a metric bolt of the same designation from say China to fit a metric nut from say Germany. There are aparently many different standards for nuts and bolts of metric design.

 

[bdx]

93.5% of world population live in a metric country.
In the UK it is illegal to weigh or advertise a product by only using imperial measurement.

Mark

 

[Johann Ohnesorg]

All I know is I often cannot get a metric bolt of the same designation from say China to fit a metric nut from say Germany. There are aparently many different standards for nuts and bolts of metric design.

Mumpitz...
Japanese and Chinese use different head sizes for the same metric threads. That´s all that is different. Chinese factories love to use "ams" which means "approximate metric size", same thing can be said for ais, you guess it, approx. inch size... This is not intended, it´s caused by the use of **cked up or badly set up production equipment.

Otherwise, it can´t be too hard to use a 13mm spanner instead of a 12mm spanner (Japanese metric to european metric). And with all the whining going on about the bad chinese quality of whatever, who wants to use chinese hardware anyhow?

Concerning the "aparently many different standards:"
There is metric Std. and metric fine. That´s it.
If metric was that bad, why would 350 million people in Europe plus Russia, India, Japan, etc. use it?

And concerning the inch, there are three countries left using it officially: The US, Myanmar and a third world country in Africa, don´t ask for the name, they switch it too fast.

Cheers,
Johann

 

[aboard_epsilon]

Multiplication of (Length in millimetres) x (Width in millimetres) x (Height in millimetres) provides an answer in cubic millimetres, aka microlights.

John .

Nah, I end up with a ten or nine figure number and take off six or five of the zeros ...to give me litres ..

you cant get confused because it takes 1000 litres from empty ..

if the score is 50000000 and its roughly half full

then it's 500 litres ..

i always do this with the google calculator of-course.

because mine don't have enough digits .......or do it knocking one zero off for cms...it only comes but once a year.......and that was for kero ..

now whole house and soon the workshop is fuelled by waste engine oil...so, no more buying expensive kero

empty tank calculation :-

http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q=1000x500x2000&btnG=Google+Search&meta=

btw if you dont have a square tank ...youre goosed .not so easy

all the best.mark

 

[gmatov]

Mark,

AHHHH! Square, or rectangular tank. That IS easy.

Here, in the USA at least, tanks are traditionally cylindrical. Calculation is a little harder, though you can always get a chart when you buy the tank, if you ask, and if you don't throw it away.

You go too far, when you calculate W X L X D to determine how much oil you need. With a square or rectangular tank, all you need know is the capacity, and the depth of remaining oil. If the tank is 4 feet high, and holds 1000 gallons, and if the level is 2 feet on your stick, you need 500 gallons, minus your expansion allowance.

You have small tanks, over there. Most oil users, here, would bury a 1000 gal, 3800 litre?, tank. Mobile homes, trailers, usually at least 1 275 gallon oblong tank, mebbe 2, and some homeowners have the same tanks in the basement.

No real trick to them, if you have a guage, and it gets to the curved part of the tank, you need oil, call that the reserve. The bulk is in the flat sided part of the tank, the "rectangular portion" above the bottom curve and below the top curve.

I assume your tank is above ground? Here, we would never bury a square or rectangular sectioned tank. Will not take the weight of machinery driven over it, or natural compression of the soil, would eventually collapse the tank. A cylinder has much more resistance to crush.

How do you like tour WO heaters? A friend has bougt 2, a 200kBTU and a second 150kBTU. Burn a lot of oil, but the building is totally uninsulated. They ARE expensive, at least here.

Cheaper than 2 USD fuel oil, though. Lots of sludge and **** to clean out of the makeup tank. Also really dirties the stack. Will plug it up if you dont clean it out. Bushels of ash to clean out.

Cheers,

George

 

[aboard_epsilon]

My waste oil burner was designed by myself,started out with some of roger Sanders (mother earth) ideas ........then after a few experiments ...i went my own way.

it has variable air intake and swirl ...very little ash, smoke or soot ..........
when i sort the centrifuge out this summer .....should be even better.

at the mo though, my pump has packed in ....

tank size is just that, 1000 litres ....i never went thru more than 1000 litres a year of kero .....

cavity wall and loft insulation , double glazing ,ever milder winters, helped.

All the best..............mark


BTW...but still had to spend £500 on fuel .....hence the waste oil burner .

 

[Douglas Martins]

I am glad the US is still not using Commie Units and I hope it stays that way.
I don't want to live like a Chinaman or a Frenchman or an African.
I want to live like an American.
Here's a thought: the whole world complains that the US is the largest consumer of the world's goods.
Therefore the rest of the world adopts a system of units that is NOT used in the US.
Makes sense, doesn't it?

I'll stick with American units.
I refuse to embrace a politically motivated state mandated system of units that is not as easy to work with as the TRADITIONAL system.
If those French were so damn great with their 35 hour work week and rampantly commie politics why does the whole world use English as the international language and lust after old American cars?

 

[hiphink]

As already mentioned in this thread, the US inch is defined in SI units. This is not a discussion about two independent systems; while some may not have noticed (‘commie’ units, eh?) that train passed a long time ago. Unlike truly independent systems, such as the Fahrenheit v. Celsius debate, the inch is today just a rather quaint way of expressing a metric base. While the US is perhaps unique in the scope of such measurements it retains, rather than supplanting them for their proper metric units, it should be noted that in fully metricated countries similar metric-based ‘measures-of-convenience’ are still used, though they are typically much more straightforwardly related to their metric base. You have for example the French livre (500g) or the Swedish mile (10 km).

So, this isn’t really a question of for/against metrics and the SI – if you want to engage in some fun debate along those lines you have to jettison the inch, foot, yard and other metric-defined units and adopt, say, cubits, fathoms, stonethrows and alnar. Could be a blast.

With that aside, what’s left is a question of whether custom metric-defined units are more useful than the proper metric bases. I’m fairly open to that, used as I am to think in (Swedish) miles rather than tens of km’s, etc. If it works for you, fine, just as long as they’re fixed to the SI.

One thing I’d like to ask those who honestly feel non-decimal units are for some reason superior, does that extend to units that are currently decimal? (E.g. would you prefer 1 newdollar being defined as 20 ‘dollings’, each dolling being made up of 12 ‘dence’?)

 

[Dimitri]

hiphink,

The Inch didn't really change in 1958 when they decided to make it equal to 25.4mm it was already that size, they just "officially" adopted it so to speak in a "legal" definition.

The Inch is a separate measurement system but when you got other countries going to metric you need to do some sort of legal standing definition to make sense of prints etc comming in from other countries.

I love how they say the meter is measured using the "super accurate" method of measuring the wavelength of light. I can do the same thing with the Inch, just need to use a separate "special" part of the light wavelengths instead of using the same "special" wavelength they decided to use for the meter definition and then fixing the speed of light to that odd ball definition of "1,650,763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red emission line in the electromagnetic spectrum of the krypton-86 atom in a vacuum" they used for the metric system.

So lets play that same "game" with the Imperial system.

One Yard is equal to 1/274,130,224 of the distance light travels in one second doing some quick math.

So I guess the Imperial system is just as special as the metric system as it got a nice even rounded number expressed as the distance of light travels in one second.

Dimitri

 

[John Chamberlain]

The reason why the Imperial system is superior is that 12 can be divided evenly two different ways whereas 10 can only be divided evenly one way.

The Imperial System is twice as good as the metric system.

 

[Carl Darnell]

It don't matter to me which measuring system is used, I convert everything to inches and thousandths.

I am like Forrest in that as long as I have a calculator and a conversion chart I am happy.

What I dislike and send back for revision is drawings with metric and inch dimentions on it. The problem with that is, did the engineer or draftsman make a mistake and use the wrong numbers so I require all of one or the other.

 

[Limy Sami]

Quote ;-metric for those that have to count on their fingers.
..................................................

Ok,who are you?......... mr Funny,........ how about you try thinking about those who've not got the normal''full set'' before posting! smart***

 

[hiphink]

Dimitri,

The Inch didn't really change in 1958 when they decided to make it equal to 25.4mm it was already that size, they just "officially" adopted it so to speak in a "legal" definition.

Are you sure the inch as an absolute (not definition, we already know that changed) did not change in 1958?

My history is hazy, but I seem to remember that the US Customary Units yard/foot/inch did in fact change in the fifties, because that's the time USCU split paths with US Geological Survey units: iirc the USGS units retained the definition of a yard in a fractional relationship to a meter, while the USCU went decimal (it was locked at the fourth or fifth decimal of the previous fraction).

What I'm definetly not sure of is how the USCU/USGS units were defined prior to 1958: weren't they actually defined as the aforementioned fractions of metrics even back then? Or did there exist a "standard yard" locked away in a vault somewhere, akin to the the olde Parisian Metre? Maybe you or someone here can help out.

The Inch is a separate measurement system

It depends on which US inch you mean, the one which is correctly fixed to the meter, or the one which has a third or fourth decimal error, the latter being (afaik) still dependent on the meter, though if so it's a bit off (the fraction used is incorrect by the third digit of the first base or something like that, I don't remember).

Ok, not trying to be an a**, I know you mean the int'l inch. However, I would have to disagree, it is categorically not a separate system, simply because it is defined by a metric base. In somewhat less abstract terms, if you have guy A with an inch scale, and guy B with another inch scale, and they differ between each other, the proper way to determine which one is correct (if anyone is) is not by finding a Golden inch but by whipping out the metre scale and determining which one is exactly 25.4 mm (or rather a decimal of a yard). That's what the inch is, so it's not separate or independent.

I love how they say the meter is measured using the "super accurate" method of measuring the wavelength of light. I can do the same thing with the Inch, [etc]

Yes, you can, but why would you? It's just a copycat game, and wouldn't it be rather lame to officially copy the metric model of natural constants, oh, three hundred years late?

(One interesting item would however be to see how such a system de facto legislated would treat the constant of lightspeed through an ideal vacuum, since iirc the eighties redefinition of the metre had more to do with fixing that constant than anything to do with the metre itself. Dunno what that was all about, a palace coup in the sciences? Perhaps the inch could get back at metrics by changing --by force of legislation-- the speed of light, eh?

)

Yeah, the Krypton thing is history btw.

 

[boslab]

Douglas the imperial system originates in the British Isles, sorry, it aint 'commie', unles of course you think the British are commies not tommies, we also started fathoms, furlongs, chains, inches, yards, gallons, pecks, quarts and a list too long to easily write in English [guess thats a commie language ], if you cut a half inch whitworth nut in half do you get a quater whit?, no offence intended just my commie sinse of irrational humour, i'm glad the Americans adopted the British system, at least there is a chance of its presivation, not writing it off as our pathetic govt would do
regard from commie/tommy/taffyland

 

[Dimitri]

hiphink,

Glad you stuck to the forums.

Anyways to answer your question there have always been "yardsticks" that were masters for the imperial system of measurement, along time before the Metric system was even conceived I do believe the 1588 Yardstick By Queen Elizabeth the First as the earliest date I know of. Americans, and most other countries also had standard yard sticks as well as far as I know, as that was the way they used to check the size of other "master" yard sticks and measuring gage blocks.

The original American Inch was 25.40005mm and the British inch slightly smaller at 25.399956 mm, in the end the Canadian Definition of 25.4mm per inch was accepted as it was the middle of the road of both of the sizes. Metric system or not they'd have accepted the Canadian Inch of 25.4mm only because it was the half way point of both the American and British Inch units which meant it was a good compromise between the 2 for the countries that found that the different definitions of a inch proved to be a major hassle during World War 2.

The difference between the US and British inch and the redefined inch of 1958 is about 2 millionths of a inch (0.0000019) so the error is pretty small and most hand measuring tools cannot read that accurately in a practical sense anyways.

Dimitri